You may already have a program to generate flow charts, like Microsoft’s Visio or the Omni Group’s OmniGraffle , but if not, there are a multitude of online options. Another, which I used to generate the flowchart here, is Gliffy. Angela Alcorn's Advice on Infographics. Last Friday’s post on infographics got much more attention than I expected from an impromptu effort.

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B2B MEMES

JUNE 13, 2011

[Generation] It’s Time to Embrace Editorial as a Profit Center

Commercial, for-profit publishing is really a process of generating one form of currency—attention—and converting it into another—money—via advertising or subscriptions. Editorial that generates attention, therefore, generates profits. Among Content marketers—in many cases, former advertisers—understand what traditional publishers have too often forgotten: editorial generates currency. Unfortunately, editors tend to abet rather than resist their characterization as cost generators. He’s right, but I prefer stronger phrasing. They’re pretty good at that.

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RECENT POSTS

AUGUST 9, 2012
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B2B MEMES[Generation] The Loneliness of the Digital Content Creator: Validating Your Work

AUGUST 9, 2012
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B2B MEMES[Generation] The Loneliness of the Digital Content Creator: Validating Your Work

JULY 4, 2012
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B2B MEMES[Generation] The Skeuomorphic Byline: How Journatic Screwed Up by Looking Backward

JULY 3, 2012
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B2B MEMES[Generation] Are You Highly Digital? Try This Test

MAY 2, 2012
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B2B MEMES[Generation] Three Common Failures in Online News: Are You At Fault?

[Generation] The Skeuomorphic Byline: How Journatic Screwed Up by Looking Backward

Reading Mathew Ingram’s take today on the controversy over content provider Journatic’s use of fake bylines in its stories for newspapers, I realized that the problem is more complex than it seems. The real issue was not that the company used fake bylines on its stories, but that it used bylines at all. Instead of looking forward, it looked backward. No related posts.

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B2B MEMES

APRIL 27, 2011

[Generation] Three Stock Photography Pitfalls to Avoid

That might be ever-so-slightly extreme, but it illustrates the strong feelings that stock photography can inadvertently generate. I’ve written recently about the need to use meaningful visuals to accompany your text. In passing, I mentioned the downsides of that frequent last resort, stock photography, but left it to an article by Heather Rubesch , elsewhere on the web, to provide details.

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B2B MEMES

MAY 2, 2012

[Generation] Three Common Failures in Online News: Are You At Fault?

Most industry bloggers insist that content generated should be exclusive—information unavailable elsewhere. For most B2B publishers, electronically delivered news content is becoming an increasingly important part of their output. The potential rewards are substantial. In theory, any B2B e-news package consistently delivering relevant, high-enterprise, fast-paced, exclusive content should dominate its competitive space. The studies focused on B2B e-news from well-known trade publishers and included totally staff-written content as well as mixes of aggregated and staff-written material.

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B2B MEMES

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

[Generation] Shakespeare Was an Aggregating Social-Media Pirate

” His plays, that is, were the result of collaboration and conversation with predecessors, contemporaries, and even later generations. Aargh? In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times , theater critic Charles McNulty wrote a marvelous column inspired by his objections to the Roland Emmerich movie, Anonymous. Nothing McNulty tells us would surprise even a casual student of Shakespeare.

But some are so clearly and consistently focused on a single community interest that they generate with almost every post a huge number of intelligent, interesting, and polite comments. Are comments more trouble than they are literally worth? According to Animal’s Joel Johnson, the answer is a resounding Yes. believe I’m right, and I think it’s important to start the discussion. And my theory is very easy to disprove: just run your own analysis on your traffic and determine exactly how many people are scrolling down the page to read comments. Johnson’s objections to comments are many.
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The authors’ four criteria for highly digital companies are pretty straightforward: The company generates a high percentage of revenues digitally. You generate your work on your own, with little need for assistance, using a variety of digital tools. In a Harvard Business Review blog post discussed last week by Mark Schaefer , authors Jeffrey Rayport and Tuck Rickards asserted that most big companies are too far behind the digital curve. By their standards, only nine of the Fortune 500 corporations are highly digital. That’s no surprise. Its leadership has deep digital experience.
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If your goal is just to generate copy, you’ll never need to ask any irritating questions. At first glance, the idea behind content marketing is straightforward and appealing: by publishing great content, you can win friends, influence people, and achieve your marketing goals. But like all great ideas, it’s not as simple or as sunny as it first appears. The problem is this: To make great content, you sometimes have to be a wee bit obnoxious. If you’ve worked much with journalists and editors, you understand. The trait is not genetic, but occupational. They weren’t, and he knew it.
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Though Harbert might not go this far, I’d put it this way: Computer-generated journalism is not terrifying, it’s liberating. They are not going away. After a flurry of attention last year , we hadn’t heard too much in the interim about the robots that were going to displace humans as content creators. Then last month, Steve Lohr of the New York Times revived the issue. Although the natural reaction of writers and editors might be fear, I think that’s the wrong reaction. The robots aren’t going to replace us, they’re going to free us. As James W. Without the I , there’s no you.
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[Generation] The Loneliness of the Digital Content Creator: Validating Your Work

The post wasn’t picked up, tweeted about on Twitter, shared, liked on Facebook and only generated a few (if any) comments. If your aim with your content is to generate a certain number of page views or comments, your degree of success will be easy to gauge. It’s undoubtedly true that the digital revolution has made us more sociable as people. But In the analog era, says Joel, writers didn’t have this problem. In fact, they didn’t really need readers at all to feel rewarded. Validation came not from readers as much as from “publishers, editors and fellow content creators.
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